This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Blame goes to the victim as Forcillo’s defence sums up: DiManno

Sammy Yatim "got himself shot" because of his actions, Peter Brauti told jurors in the first-degree murder trial of the police officer who shot him repeatedly shortly after arriving at the scene. (THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Second-guessing where an officer draws the proverbial line in the sand — that way lies madness, and maybe a dead officer.

Officers are not obliged to gamble with their own lives, or the lives of bystanders.

An imminent threat doesn’t mean one second later necessarily, or two seconds later necessarily — although one second later or two seconds later might mean the difference between life and death for an officer.

Judgment calls should not be criminalized.

Article Continued Below

Sammy Yatim “got himself shot.’’

It was textbook exculpation, a courtroom primer on why so few cops are ever convicted of criminal wrongdoing arising from a fatal confrontation with a civilian. And this was a shooting that triggered outrage from the public.

Sammy Yatim, the knife-brandishing teenager struck by eight of nine bullets fired by Const. James Forcillo two and a half years ago, “got himself shot,” defence lawyer Peter Brauti told the jury Tuesday in his closing address of a months-long trial.

A shooting which, as Brauti repeatedly implied, should never have come to trial, with a cop in the dock. A fatal use of force that was entirely justified, as per the training manual, as per the officer’s reasonable crisis management, as per the menace presented by a non-compliant young man wielding a switchblade — a prohibited weapon in Canada — who not only disregarded the officer’s oft-reiterated order to “Drop the knife!” but taunted him as a “p---y” and took a step forward after taking a step back, in an endangering manner.

How facile, Brauti sneered, to criticize and blame Forcillo now “sitting here, in comfortable chairs, in a well-lit courtroom, sitting in judgment.’’

But that is what trials do, by definition — judge. As this jury of peers will be called upon to do when they begin their deliberations next week.

Forcillo has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and attempted murder in the death of 18-year-old Yatim, shot as he stood at the top of the steps of an empty streetcar, driver and all the passengers having fled when the suspect rose in the back with a knife in one hand and his penis in the other, Forcillo and numerous other officers arrayed on the street, some with guns drawn.

“Officer James Forcillo is not guilty of murder, attempted murder or any other criminal offence,” Brauti confidently maintained in the day-long closing address — and he’s only half-way through. “What the prosecution is really trying to do is criminalize a judgment call.’’

By after-the-fact parsing, with the luxury of time, in the reflection of a rear-view mirror. Micro-analysis, Brauti called it. As opposed to the macro-analysis which he spent six hours yesterday extemporizing.

“They must disprove justification in the line of duty beyond any reasonable doubt. They must disprove self-defence beyond any reasonable doubt. And they have to disprove (Forcillo’s) state of mind beyond any reasonable doubt.

“The prosecution has not done that in this case. Instead, what the Crown has done is thrown everything that they can at you, and the effect has been to distract and unduly complicate the task at hand.

“They have invited you and will continue to invite you to engage in a micro-analysis of every action that not only Officer Forcillo took, but every officer who testified took, on the night in question.’’

He made it sound like a crime, an exercise in fussiness and nit-picking: how far Forcillo was standing when he fired in two separate volleys (about 12 feet); his failure to consider any alternate method of defusing the situation, such as pepper-spray; the absence of communication with Yatim to de-escalate the crisis beyond his barked orders to drop the knife and not take another step forward; the necessity of shooting at the teenager nine times, six of those shots delivered after Yatim was down and — as we now know — already in the process of dying, struck in the heart and paralyzed below the waist. All of that before another officer, a sergeant, zapped him with a Taser.

“It is a frame-by-frame, inch-by-inch, zoomed-in, slowed-down analysis of a big-picture approach to what really happened,” Brauti continued.

A prosecutorial tactic, the lawyer asserted, aimed not at enlightening the jury but, rather, muddling, luring them into taking their eyes off the ball — which was Yatim’s dangerous behavior, Yatim’s defiance, Yatim’s provocation. Yatim, who “got himself shot.”

“The hope being that someone one this jury will latch onto one of the many things thrown against the wall.’’

Because — this is the inference — jurors are easily manipulated by a clever or merely machine-gunning prosecutor.

“The hope is to cloud the big picture and what common sense tells us from the evidence.’’

A big picture contained in 50 seconds — that’s how long the confrontation lasted, between the time Forcillo and his partner arrived on the scene and Yatim bleeding out on the floor of the streetcar, a dramatic scene captured by multiple surveillance videos inside and outside that Dundas St. car.

Later in the week, the Crown will get its two-day kick at the closing argument can. Essentially, the thrust of their case is that Forcillo’s actions were neither necessary nor reasonable.

When he took the stand in November, Forcillo told court that Yatim was heedless of his orders and that he feared the teenager intended to come down off the streetcar — that he’d “flicked’’ his knife in a threatening manner — and needed to be stopped lest he lunge at the officers, imperil their lives.

So he left off after the initial volley of shots. Paused five seconds, then believed Yatim was trying to get up again — was reaching over with one hand to draw the dropped knife into his other hand. So he, Forcillo, fired six more shots.

But the video shows — and Forcillo acknowledged this in his testimony — that Yatim was not, in fact, lifting his shoulders at a 45-degree angle. Nor does the video show Yatim seizing the knife again after the flung-arm gesture. But Forcillo saw, he testified, the pre-assaultive indicators — the clenched jaw, the wide-eyed expression of anger, the fierce intent to come off that streetcar and do harm.

Bang-bang-bang. Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.

Just as Forcillo, a cop with three and a half years on the force, had been trained to react within the “danger zone’’ between an officer and an armed suspect, “where lethal force might be justifiable.”

Critical moments, a heartbeat’s decision.

Brauti: “What’s important to understand is it is Mr. Yatim’s outward behavior that results in him being shot. If he obeys any one of the dozen commands given, if he puts down the knife, Mr. Yatim lives to be put on trial for criminal conduct and we would not be here today.’’

Sammy Yatim, who’d taken Ecstasy earlier that July night, was the author of his own fatal misfortune.

Sammy Yatim, who should have dropped the knife — with which he never stabbed anybody, it should be remembered.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com